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Cabezas de Cera

I overslept on Saturday at Nearfest. As a result, I missed this band. They were on first thing in the AM. When I managed to drag myself in, everyone was raving about them. "The program said they were Avant Gard, and I didn't think I'd like them, but they were amazing!"

They had a video of them live playing on their merch table, and I ended up buying their compilation disk...

...and discovered that I needed to see these people.

They played at the North Star Bar in Philly on Monday night, and at Mojo 13 in wilmington tonight, which is where I saw them. They'll be in Washington the next 2 nights, and then in Baltimore on Saturday.

IF YOU CAN GET OUT THERE TO SEE THEM, DO SO! Who knows when they'll next be in the US? This year they went through work-visa hell because of nearfest, but barring a big festival, a US tour is perhaps more difficult than it is worth.

How to describe them? Well, that's the difficult part. Sometimes they sound like latin flavored jazz fusion. Sometimes they are reminiscent of Frippertronics, or mexican folk music, or the Lounge Lizards. And sometimes they throw themselves into heavy, King Crimson-like driving cacophony. They flow between these things effortlessly.

The band is:Mauricio Sotelo - Chapman Stick, Oud, 12 string guitar, and some sort of weird creation instrument that looks somewhat like the prow of a ship. It's got 3 strings and is made of metal, and is played by bowing, strumming, plucking, tapping on the side (which gets a cool steel drum sort of sound), and banging the snot out of it with a drum stick. The Chapman Stick he played in the standard tapping style, but then also would strum, pluck or slap the thing.

Francisco Sotelo - drums and percussion. Sometimes he'd be playing the drums, the bass line and a keyboard part, all using the drum pads.